ALBUM REVIEWS
“Who the folk is Father John Misty?” NME asked back in 2017. It was a fair question. Everyone knew by then that the singer-songwriter was a terminally online folkie – not the only contradiction about him – who’d followed an album of archly ironic love songs (2015’s ‘I Love You, Honeybear’) with a sprawling opus about the sheer madness of life in the 21st Century (‘Pure Comedy’). But who was he really?
An infamously agonising 6 Music interview had come no closer to uncovering the man behind the moniker, who was born Joshua Tillman but insisted that Father John Misty was not a character. If the answer to NME’s question lies somewhere in the liminal space between the earnest Tillman and the cynical Misty, the music has always been nakedly ambitious and rich with emotion. On his last album, 2022’s ‘Chloë and the Next 20th Century’, he threw his hands up at the modern world and retreated self-consciously into retro big band pastiche.
You’d think that capitulation might lead to a dead end, but ‘Mahashmashana’ finds Misty liberated from the obsession with contemporary pop culture that he’s grappled with since 2012’s ‘Fear Fun’. This might be related to his recent assertion that he’s experienced “a few non-elective ego deaths, where the self is receding” – including parenthood. So the gently psychedelic new record is named after a Sanskrit word meaning “great cremation ground”, its opening title track a string-laden epic ballad that breaks the nine-minute mark with surreal poetry hinting at “the next universal dawn”. You can only conclude it’s snarky old Misty who’s been toasted.
In his place has risen an apparently sincere engagement with spirituality that the phony Father only affected. On the loungey ‘Josh Tillman and the Accidental Overdose’, he seems to reflect on his own brief dalliance with celebrity. He once revealed that he was “completely fucked up” in that 6 Music interview, and here portrays another encounter, which leads him to confess: “Around this time, I publicly / Was treating acid with anxiety / I was unwell.”
Contrasting with this recollection, there’s a peacefulness to ‘Mahashmashana’, the tone grounded even when its author veers into psych-rock (the pounding ‘She Cleans Up’) and strutting funk (‘I Guess Time Makes Fools of Us All’). Half of its eight tracks spool on for more than six minutes and he’s not minded, these days, to explain them in interviews or on social media. Instead he’s bowed out from the spotlight to produce a record that tunes into love, ageing and the search for meaning without the compulsion for a punchline or wry aside.
As a result, the lush ‘Mahashmashana’ doesn’t quite mainline the zeitgeist in the same way that ‘Honeybear’ and ‘Pure Comedy’ did. Then again, there’s something to be said, in 2024, for logging off in favour of self-reflection. On the swooning ‘Mental Health’, Misty rejects the hive mind, concluding that his own particular “insanity” is “indispensable”. Whoever the folk he is underneath that beard, the good Father can’t help but share words of wisdom.
ALBUM REVIEWS
The leather jackets and skinny jeans worn by Noah Dillon and Chandler Ransom Lucy have become something of a signature, and the pair have hovered around the edges of the pop worlds in New York and Los Angeles for quite some time. First highlighted by NME during the Dimes Square resurgence in 2023, The Hellp have gradually stepped away from their earlier indie-sleaze imitation and leaned into something far more thoughtful. Their wild, neon-tinged party vibe has been traded for a more cinematic electronic approach that still holds onto a confident, self-aware attitude.
Dillon and Lucy started releasing music as The Hellp in 2016, with early mixtapes rooted in the chaotic nights and carefree behaviour once associated with NYC’s indie-sleaze staples like LCD Soundsystem and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Over time, though, they’ve earned a steadily growing respect from critics. That rise has come through both their underground gigs, which have included a show at London’s Corsica Studios with Fakemink as support, and through Dillon’s expanding visual work that recently reached Rosalía’s ‘LUX’ album and a pair of music videos for 2hollis.
As ‘Riviera’ approached release, the duo shared: “We knew our next project would need to be a bit more mature… we refuse to become stagnant. ‘Riviera’ is more solemn, restrained and impassioned than anything we’ve done before.” The finished album feels like Dillon and Lucy carefully balancing identity and openness, theatricality and direct emotion.
The lead release, ‘Country Road’, carries a late-night heaviness, the kind of confession you would quietly tell a friend in a club’s smoking area. Its lonely tone is surrounded by glitching electronics and a rising bridge that points to the exhaustion that follows endless nights out. Tracks like ‘New Wave America’ and ‘Cortt’ deepen what the duo mention in their liner notes as a “desperate story of the disparate Americana.” Both pieces broaden the album’s emotional landscape and offer clear-eyed commentary on reluctantly stepping into adulthood.
When ‘Riviera’ shifts into ‘Doppler’, the tone brightens for a moment as hopeful synths lift Dillon’s words about yearning and heartbreak into an emotional peak. And in the final moments of the record, The Hellp land on something instantly familiar to anyone who has drifted away from the club scene. The Kavinsky-like opening of ‘Here I Am’ nods to their early inspirations, while the closing track ‘Live Forever’ arrives with a slow, grounded maturity, built around Dillon repeating the line: “I don’t want to live forever.”
‘Riviera’ holds far less disorder than The Hellp’s earlier releases. This turn inward marks an important risk for a duo once fuelled by the momentum of a downtown New York comeback. By easing off the frenzy, The Hellp have stepped out of the party’s lingering haze and returned with a style that feels more refined and more aware of itself than anything they have created before.
